The ups and downs of Laser sailing

Preparing for takeoff.

If you’ve never capsized, you’re not trying hard enough. Words to live by, I say, but I also used to tell this to my students when I was a sailing instructor. And so the thought flashed through my mind when the gusty wind, that had my cousin Helen and I hiking far out over the windward side of the Laser, suddenly died as we passed the lee of an island.

If you’ve ever been in this situation, you know what happens next—how hard it is to get one’s bottom (never mind two bottoms) back into the boat in a timely fashion when gravity is holding you back. And so I knew, seconds before it happened, that we were going to dump the boat—to windward.

I can’t recall the last time I capsized a boat. However my cousin, on a cottage holiday with us while visiting from Scotland, had never capsized, though she is taking dinghy sailing lessons at home. There was no stopping it: Like some kind of badly rehearsed acrobatic team, we tumbled backwards into the water.

Seconds later, having determined that both we and our sunglasses were still intact, we disentangled ourselves from the mainsheet and swam out from under the boom around the back of the boat, which of course was now lying on its side. The centreboard stuck out the bottom of the hull like a mini diving board. I reached up and pulled down on the end, and the boat bobbed back upright.  Then we hauled our soaking selves back into the cockpit. Thanks to the Laser’s self-draining cockpit and the return of the gusty wind, we were back in business.

You can imagine how strong the wind was that day to have us almost on a plane with two people in this little singlehander, but we had a blast. Having finally experienced a capsize, Helen was not the least bit afraid and became a better sailor for it.

Like I said, everyone needs to capsize once in a while.